BOOKS & ARTS
Wonder of Wenders
Christopher Bray
The Pixels of Paul Cézanne and
Reflections on Other Artists
by Wim Wenders, translated by Jen Calleja
Faber, £14.99, pp. 189
What know they of movies who only mov-
ies know? Wim Wenders’s latest collection
of essays arrives at a time when the best-
known film critic in England is unashamed
to claim that tendentious tosh The Exor-
cist as the best picture ever made. Even
though the slightest piece in The Pixels of
Paul Cézanne is its title essay, it is good to
know that there is still at least one film buff
around who is alive to the first six arts.
As a young man in Dusseldorf, Wenders
fancied himself a painter — so much so that,
before the movies lured him away, he was
planning to further his studies in Paris. So
while he tells us nothing about Cézanne’s
work that Meyer Schapiro hadn’t filled
us in on way back when, there can be lit-
called Lois, wisdom-dispensing members of
the local ‘Lois Club’ (possibly a cute touch
too far).
Salvation arrives in the form of a take-
away menu from an unlicensed restaurant
run by two brothers, Beoreg and Chaiman,
who hail from a mysterious European cul-
ture known as the Mazg (completely but
convincingly made up by Sloan). Their
spicy soup comes with a special bread that
miraculously heals Lois’s body and soul.
When the brothers face deportation, they
bestow a crock of the starter dough on their
‘number one eater’, with the instruction
that she tend the (as she imagines) sentient
microbes every day.
As Lois goes from hapless baker to hip-
ster breadmaker, she not only hears her
starter sing but sees faces in the bread’s
crusts. Her sourdough eventually secures
her an invitation to an elite farmers’ mar-
ket in Alameda, where her fellow stallhold-
ers are fusing food and technology to invent
products like Chernobyl honey. Video con-
ferences are overseen by a mystery CEO
disguised as a talking fish, who decries both
America’s corn-syrup food industrialists
and the farm-to-table epicureans.
Sloan, whose debut novel, Mr Penumbra’s
24-Hour Bookstore explored the future of the
printed word, clearly believes the traditional-
ist and the futurist need not be locked in com-
bat. That may seem a little optimistic, and yet
there’s something so unjaded about his story,
and so plucky about Lois that I found myself
captivated by its tiny dramas despite myself.
Perhaps it’s that Californian can-do
spirit. Or perhaps it’s just a relief to read
a novel about breaking bread rather than
broken humans.
abstractions of Kenneth Noland and Rich-
ard Diebenkorn. To Wenders’s eyes it is the
study of a suicide out of James or Melville:
Someone has just leapt out of the open door...
into the sea, whose waves are billowing direct-
ly below the threshold of the room, as if this
house was built on a cliff or standing on stilts...
And the next minute a boat will appear in the
distance on the horizon, too far away to fish
out the person who has thrown himself (or
herself?) into the infinite sea.Wenders being Wenders, the book isn’t
all paintings. Many of his filmic father fig-
ures — Bergman, Sam Fuller, Antonio-
ni, Douglas Sirk (deliciously labelled ‘the
Dante of Soap’) — are here too. Wenders
is good on Anthony Mann’s psychologically
inflected Westerns of the 1950s. Once again
the comparison is made with John Ford,
with Wenders arguing that while Ford’s oat-
ers give us a ‘formidable, mythical Ameri-
ca, shining through to us from the past’,
Mann’s offer up a landscape that’s ‘realistic,
valid, present through and through’. Once
again he spots stuff even the most seasoned
aficionadoes have missed — such as the
way Mann’s images remain in focus all
the way from near to far.
Then again, so what? Too often Wenders
seems to think a point has been made when
he hasn’t even got an argument going. Are
all films with deep-focus imagery prefera-
ble to those with shallower depths-of-field?
And fascinating though it is to be told that
Ozu’s performers look at the camera, rathertle doubt that Wenders knows his way
around an image. I can’t say that his essay
on Andrew Wyeth did anything to change
my mind about that gothic puritan dullard.
But there is no gainsaying Wenders’s insight
that ‘Edward Hopper does not paint close-
ups — something he has in common with
John Ford’.
That claim comes from a piece original-
ly published in Die Zeit in 1996, but Wend-
ers was a Hopper-long kid long before that.
There is barely an image in The American
Friend — Wenders’s take on Patricia High-
smith’s Ripley’s Game — that doesn’t have
its origins in one of Hopper’s canvases. The
orange that frames or slices through pret-
ty much every scene in the movie is bor-
rowed from the petrol pumps in Hopper’s
‘Gas’. The low-slung, wide-angled Hamburg
cityscapes pay homage to Hopper’s can-
vases such as ‘Nighthawks’ and ‘New York
Office’. And the movie’s big murder scene,
set on a train rushing through the German
countryside, is lit and composed just like
the surreally frozen lounge in Hopper’s
‘Western Motel’.
Not that we are dealing with a mere
image-maker. Pauline Kael once said that
Wenders liked stories even though he was
no good at telling them. The truth is, Wend-
ers is so good at stories he can see them eve-
rywhere. To most modern eyes, Hopper’s
‘Rooms by the Sea’ is a collocation of col-
oured triangles and trapezoids so subject-
free it looks forward to the post-painterlyGETTY IMAGES